Wednesday, February 18, 2009

I've got a story up on Macon.com talking to Georgia AD Damon Evans about the recent bickering around the SEC regarding everything from assistant coaches to recruiting violations. Read the story, but here's the complete Q&A from this part of my interview with Evans. I'll have more with Damon on a wide variety of topics later this week...

Hale: Tennessee and Auburn came pretty hard after some of your assistants, guys I'm sure you and Coach Richt wanted to keep. Neither of your guys left, but both of those schools ended up landing some high-profile assistants at some really big salaries. Do you think the economic paradigm for assistants has changed, and how will Georgia adjust to it?

Evans: I think it has changed at certain institutions. As of late, we've had three to four institutions that have done some significant changes -- Tennessee, Auburn and Washington. You've got the national-championship Florida Gators, and you don't hear these grandiose salaries come out of there.

My philosophy is this: We want to keep up with the marketplace. Three institutions don't set the marketplace from my standpoint. They have to do what they feel is appropriate for them, but what I like to do is look at the big picture and see where everyone is big picture and ask, where is Georgia in that marketplace: Lower, middle or upper? Wherever we are, do we feel comfortable with where we are? That's the question I have to answer every day. I tend to believe that we have kept our coaches in a good position in the marketplace.

Do I think that marketplace is going to change? Yes, I think it's going to change. Will we at Georgia do what's appropriate for the University of Georgia with regard to that marketplace? Yes, at the right time, but I'm not going to overreact to what a handful of schools have done.

And I'll add this: Those schools that have done that are all the schools that were in positions where they had to fire their coach, and there's now pressure to bring in a coach and try to build these staffs. I've said it before -- does more money guarantee you more wins? You, as an institution, have to decide. Maybe for Tennessee, what they pay, they think is right. Maybe for Washington, they think it's right. The same for Auburn. You just have to get to a point where you say, is what we're offering fair to our coaches? That's what I want to do. I want to make sure our coaches feel good. I don't want them to be the lowest paid. And I said this to our head coach, I'm not going to overreact to one or two institutions. I just won't do that.

DH: Lane Kiffin has been in the news a lot the last couple weeks with criticisms of several other SEC programs, including Georgia. You read the message boards, listen to talk radio, and you hear all kinds of stuff that varies from fact to vague interpretations of the truth. First off, have there been any recruiting violations at Georgia that you are aware of, and secondly, what do you think when other programs make accusations or insinuations about Georgia that manage to work their way into the national discussion?

DE: As far as violations, and talking specifically football, I have the utmost confidence in Mark Richt, and I know he does things the right way, and that's never a concern.

Are there violations? Yes, because they're secondary violations and that's what they are -- secondary in nature. The definition of those violations are inadvertent violations where you make a mistake. You're only allowed to call a kid once a week, and you got mixed up where Coach X called and Coach Y called, so now we weren't on the same page and that's a violation. So we have violations, and I don't know what the number of those are, but they're inadvertent.

The other thing that I go back and say is, if you don't have any violations at your institution, in my humble opinion, you don't have a good system of checks and balances in place because people are going to make mistakes.

I truly believe that the secondary violations that occur here are inadvertent, they're mistakes that are made, and I have the utmost confidence that our staff is not that way. We have a guy leading us who has a high level of integrity and we're in a place where we don't need to cheat to have success here, so I don't get caught up in what people say because it's like a snowball -- someone can say one thing, but it's what I know and how I feel, and I feel great about how our football staff conducts its business.

DH: Obviously it makes my job a lot easier when there is the back-and-forth between coaches, but does it bother you at all?

DE: I'm serious about making sure we're doing things the right way and we're mindful of the rules, but when it comes to he said, she said, I don't really pay any of that any attention. That's part of college athletics, and some fans will say they're doing this at Alabama, they're doing this at Georgia... as long as I know what's going on and I'm comfortable with how we conduct our business, I'm fine.

You're the man. BTW, in these economic times, if you need to do a wikipedia like fund drive for the blog, I don't think you'd struggle to find contributions. Your blog alone beats the coverage of the AJC and ABH by a large margin. Thanks again.

Search Top Blogs...

Subscribe To

My Latest Tweets

Twitter Updates

About the Author

Seth Emerson has been covering the SEC and Georgia (on and off) since 2002. He worked at the Albany Herald from 2002-05, then spent five years at The State in Columbia, S.C., covering South Carolina. He returned to Athens in August of 2010, only to find that David Pollack and David Greene were no longer playing for the Bulldogs. Adjustments were made.

Emerson is originally from Silver Spring, Md., and graduated from Maryland in 1998 with a degree in journalism and a minor in getting lost on the way to practically everywhere. Then he spent four years at The Washington Post, covering small colleges, a couple NCAA basketball tournaments, and on one glorious day, was yelled at by Tony Kornheiser. It was probably at The Post that he also learned to write in the third person.

These days he lives in Athens with his beloved and somewhat wimpy dog, Archie. Together they fight crime at night in northeast Georgia, except on nights there is no crime, in which case they sit at home, sip on white wine and watch reruns of "Mad Men."